The Fourth Wheel, Issue 75

Only Watch postponed; The lazy side of watch art; A mysterious Tudor...

Hello and welcome back to The Fourth Wheel, the weekly watch newsletter that was asked if it would be celebrating this week’s ‘anniversary’ milestone of 75 issues. Let me take this chance to put on record: at TFW, it’s multiples of 50 or 100 that matter. I’m not making Speedmasters here. When the century does come up, I promise I’ll have something special.

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Here’s a little taste of what you might have missed recently:

Blancpain joins the horological Swatch-iverse
Some modest proposals for the improvement of watch retail
Quick-fire watch reviews; scrutiny falls on Only Watch
First-hand answers on the Only Watch saga
Audemars Piguet pulls out: Only Watch analysis continued

And there’s much more waiting to be discovered in the archives.

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So at the start of this week Only Watch announced that it would postpone its sale until next year. Obviously the team had read last week’s newsletter!

It was the right move; arguably it could have come earlier, and from Only Watch’s perspective they would have preferred to get that decision out there before AP pulled out. They would have been leading, taking firm action, rather than reacting to the unilateral move of one participant. Good crisis comms involves controlling the narrative, something Only Watch has had a hard time doing since this furore erupted.

This is why I would love more than anything to know the nature of the communication between AP and OW: if as you’d expect, AP gave them the courtesy of advance warning that it was going to pull out, you would have thought OW would have done anything to keep them in. I put this to Only Watch, and Matthieu Chauzy replied this week, saying “Postponement was not on the agenda at the time.”

I asked:

“Does Only Watch want Audemars Piguet to return and intend to convince them to do so now that the sale has been postponed?” 

“We cannot answer for AP. In any case, we have always been very clear on the importance of free will in choosing to participate to a given edition of Only Watch or not. This is what guarantees a sincere commitment to the project. We would like to salute their support to date which has contributed to the progress of research into Duchenne muscular dystrophy.” 

Come the new year, I wonder whether anything will change AP’s decision.

The statement announcing the postponement went to some lengths to emphasis the amount of information that has been shared since October 8th, when Luc Pettavino wrote his open letter to the community, and carried an understandable undertone of regret that the auction would not be going ahead. But in deciding to postpone, Only Watch has regained some control of events and maybe, just maybe, will breathe a sigh of relief that it did not have to endure the public spectacle of each and every one of its 62 participating brands deciding whether to stick or fold¹.

The big brands and groups have been let off the hook; I can promise you there is nothing they like less than being pressured into taking a stance one way or another on something like this. For the sake of Only Watch’s continued existence - which I still see as a positive outcome - I am glad we didn’t get to this point. But as an objective observer and more to the point, someone who has spent his working life trying to assay what really goes on behind the curtain at the big watch brands, I would dearly like to know which way the chips would have fallen. Was Patek Philippe readying its excuses? Would LVMH’s letter have been answered to its satisfaction? Would Tudor - which, let’s not forget, is owned by the biggest charitable organisation in all of watchmaking - have pledged its support?²